Author: Jack Hughes

An experienced software engineer with 20+ years experience writing products for Microsoft Windows based operating systems as well as 12+ years experience hosting websites on Linux and Windows including e-commerce and CMS systems.
View all posts by Jack Hughes

I recall the stories about Jamie Cansdale and TestDriven from a year or so ago… Microsoft almost – I guess – took him to the cleaners because the plugin he was giving away made the Express edition of VS as good as the cost-option…

He didn’t really do anything wrong and they scrapped his Most Important Partner status or whatever it was and the legal letters were all over the ‘net for a while.

If you have time do a bit of digging – it was a fascinating read and showed just what a bunch of total bas***ds M$ really are.

Having now gone and read all of the emails and letters…Microsoft could have short-circuited the process very easily by telling Jamie Cansdale exactly which clauses he was supposed to be in breach of. I’m currently writing some .NET open source code and episodes such as this hardly help with your motivation. At least they could never hold out a MVP over my head because I would *never* accept it in the first place…reminds me of the red & black points they handed out at school if you were naughty or good respectively. Strange how baubles like that motivate some people.

“… Microsoft could have short-circuited the process very easily by telling Jamie Cansdale exactly which clauses he was supposed to be in breach of.”

Just like telling the FOSS world which Patents Linux, OOo and the rest are infringing. But of course that would never do. They’d either be found to be crap patents (which in the case of US patent law would be my guess) or the FOSS community would re-write the infringing bits before Brad Smith could say Richard Stallman!.

BTW, if you are interested, RMS is speaking in Manchester on Thursday evening… We are going up for it.